Re: Snort production setup design

["Davison, Charles Robert" <cdaviso1 () vols utk edu>]

Sandeep,

Sorry I did not clarify… when I was referring to VPC I was referencing the AWS VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), and if you 
apply the router that I was talking about before it sits on the edge of your VPC. If you don’t want to end up using 
Snort as a HIDS essentially the best thing to do is to buy that router and tap your traffic, inbound/outbound, of your 
VPC to your desired Snort device. The router to my knowledge supports HSRP so you could build redundancy between the 
two devices and set up your tap on each router to send the traffic to another VPC or a local Datacenter or anywhere you 
want. Your SIEM could then read the alerts from whatever locations you set up. And since you have routing redundancy 
with HSRP if one routing link fails the data would get sent to the other snort instance. Even though you might have 
separate data centers to help make this redundant you would only have one SIEM reading the same log data so it would 
put both alerting results into context. There are many ways to perform what you’re talking about but I made a simple 
diagram below that explains what we are talking about (also attached). Please forgive my lack of artistry/visio :D

[cid:image002.jpg@01D1392B.0E7DD6C0]
If you do have a SIEM you essentially get a copy of your snort logs sent via syslog, there is an option in the 
snort.conf to add a syslog server, and if this was at a local data center then you would not have to worry about 
storage space in AWS. And since the cisco virtual routers support enterprise VPNs you could tie them into your network. 
If you wanted to do HIDS as well this would be fine… you would want to install OSSEC or Samhain on your computer in the 
AWS VPC, the traffic could then get passed along the same way to your SIEM for interpretation of host activity. Almost 
everything in the above example could be done via open source except the routing part, which even if you did find an 
open source router I would recommend going with the Cisco one due to all the feature available to help our with 
redundancy. Keep in mind that this whole design would rest on the routers not being able to scale elastically. So as 
long as you are running a small web service you should be fine, but this would be your bottle neck, and you would have 
to manually add more routers over time to service requests. To my knowledge there is still not official elastic tap 
capability in AWS for the edge routing piece if there was that would be awesome. Hopefully this answered your 
questions. If not let me know what I am missing so I can better understand what you’re asking for.

From: sandeep dubey [mailto:sandeep.sanash () gmail com]
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2015 9:37 PM
To: Davison, Charles Robert <cdaviso1 () vols utk edu>
Cc: Steven Dracker <steven () egifter com>; Rodgers, Anthony (DTMB) <RodgersA1 () michigan gov>; snort-users () lists 
sourceforge net
Subject: Re: [Snort-users] Snort production setup design

Thanks Charles and all for your opinions and suggestion.

The server i am running is not in VPC mode, it is in Classic mode, this server is very busy and critical where i don't 
want to install packages like OpenVPN etc., however i can create a new server for this purpose if it works. I want to 
install minimal package like snort only  which will run in IDS mode and it's log should go to some server where i 
should be able to analyse those logs and send alerts. I want to avoid space issue on server or i will have to attache 
EBS volume to store logs locally.

Performance is a big concern in this case because the servers i am running doesn't support load balance nor HA. It is 
dedicated 3 servers serving RPC calls. If any of the server goes down service gets impacted.

I am looking for only Opensource solutions.

Is it possible to install Snort on these server in NIDS mode and ship the logs to another server like mentioned here - 
http://sublimerobots.com/2015/12/snort-2-9-8-x-on-ubuntu-part-4/.
In above like it assumes all on single server, where i want snort on my production servers but logs and other tools 
mentioned should be on another dedicated server.

Please bear with me for basic beginner questions and doubt, I am very new to this (security) field.

Let me know your suggestion, opinions and guidelines.

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 8:46 PM, Davison, Charles Robert <cdaviso1 () vols utk edu<mailto:cdaviso1 () vols utk edu>> 
wrote:
If you want to do a true NIDS and not a HIDS on all your AWS boxes there are a couple of things you can do.


1.       Read this article: https://github.com/Security-Onion-Solutions/security-onion/wiki/CloudClient It describes 
how you can utilize netsniff-ng as a virtual tap. See below for install instructions:

Installing Netsniff-NG: To install netsniff-ng start by the required dependencies:

sudo apt-get install git build-essential ccache flex bison libnl-3-dev libnl-genl-3-dev libnl-route-3-dev libgeoip-dev 
libnetfilter-conntrack-dev libncurses5-dev liburcu-dev libnacl-dev libpcap-dev zlib1g-dev libcli-dev libnet1-dev

Next, compile and install netsniff-ng.

git clone git://github.com/netsniff-ng/netsniff-ng.git
cd netsniff-ng
make
sudo make install

2.       The other option would be to buy a cisco virtual router v1000. This router will sit at the edge of your VPC. 
You can tap traffic from an entire VPC back to a single NIDs box/cluster, probably the easiest option as well. The only 
thing you wont be able to see is lateral movement within an environment since your taped traffic will only be the 
external communications. To cover your assets you will need a HIDs installed on your servers for lateral movement. The 
only downside to this scenario is that the router that sits on the edge does not elastically scale. The last time I 
checked the v1000’s get 1GB throughput, bidirectional, at the highest licensing tier. You might be able to manually add 
more v1000’s if you need to accommodate higher traffic to a particular VPC, but you might want to double check with 
Cisco on that.

3.       If you have any further questions reach out to me and I would be happy to help.

From: sandeep dubey [mailto:sandeep.sanash () gmail com<mailto:sandeep.sanash () gmail com>]
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2015 7:51 AM
To: Steven Dracker <steven () egifter com<mailto:steven () egifter com>>
Cc: Rodgers, Anthony (DTMB) <RodgersA1 () michigan gov<mailto:RodgersA1 () michigan gov>>; snort-users () lists 
sourceforge net<mailto:snort-users () lists sourceforge net>

Subject: Re: [Snort-users] Snort production setup design

I have installed and configure OSSEC as agent and server for monitoring the system level changes like files, integrity, 
log monitoring, packages changes, ports changes etc.

Not monitoring any network related stuff though.

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 8:09 PM, Steven Dracker <steven () egifter com<mailto:steven () egifter com>> wrote:
I noticed on the GitHub Security Onion Wiki that it requires a Span Port - “For a production deployment, you'll need a 
tap or SPAN/monitor port. Here are some inexpensive tap/span solutions:”. These solutions look like they are not 
compatible with AWS.

My findings are that AWS does not support Span, Tap or Mirror on their network layer to get a copy of traffic to 
inspect which is needed for Network IDS. so I am confused as to how this solution could be deployed for NIDS on AWS. 
Same thing holds true for Snort.

I have only been successful finding Host Based IDS solutions for AWS which require an Agent on each node. Either they 
do the IDS analysis on the node itself or do a “soft-tap” on the host’s network adapter (Not at the VPC Perimeter) and 
pass it to an IDS manager.

How do you do inline HIDS on AWS is my question. I am coming up with a lot of the same questions out there but no 
answers.

Thanks,
Steve


From: sandeep dubey [mailto:sandeep.sanash () gmail com<mailto:sandeep.sanash () gmail com>]
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2015 9:09 AM
To: Rodgers, Anthony (DTMB) <RodgersA1 () michigan gov<mailto:RodgersA1 () michigan gov>>
Cc: snort-users () lists sourceforge net<mailto:snort-users () lists sourceforge net>
Subject: Re: [Snort-users] Snort production setup design

Thanks Rodgers for reply,

I am running my production environment on public cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS), where i don't have control for 
installing iso/img etc.

Is SecurityOnion equivalent to OSSIM ?

On Thu, Dec 17, 2015 at 7:03 PM, Rodgers, Anthony (DTMB) <RodgersA1 () michigan gov<mailto:RodgersA1 () michigan gov>> 
wrote:
Can’t recommend SecurityOnion highly enough.

--
Anthony Rodgers
Security Analyst
Michigan Security Operations Center (MiSOC)
DTMB, Michigan Cyber Security

From: sandeep dubey [mailto:sandeep.sanash () gmail com<mailto:sandeep.sanash () gmail com>]
Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2015 04:53
To: snort-users () lists sourceforge net<mailto:snort-users () lists sourceforge net>
Subject: [Snort-users] Snort production setup design

Hi,

Is it possible to install snort in IDS mode on multiple servers (AWS EC2 instances ) and have a central server where 
analysis can be done through gui and also alerts/notification can be managed like OSSEC ?

If yes, what is the tools to use and how to move ahead?

--
Regards,
Sandeep



--
Regards,
Sandeep



--
Regards,
Sandeep



--
Regards,
Sandeep

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